Wednesday, October 11, 2006

"Something" about what "some" chinese think about Japan

NANJING, China (AP) -- In his furniture shop across the road from a war memorial, in a city where the bad memories are kept alive and raw, Shen Tao doesn't mince words."We hate Japan," the furniture dealer said, jabbing the air with a cigarette for emphasis. "It doesn't really much matter what the Japanese government does. This isn't going to change."Such hardened sentiments highlight the difficulties facing Japan's newly installed prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who is coming to China on Sunday saying he wants to improve ties that have been inflamed in recent years by contemporary rivalries and by unresolved issues from World War II and the Japanese invasion that preceded it.Nowhere do the latter find harsher expression than in this fast-growing city along the Yangtze River.Nanjing suffered a rampage of murder, rape and looting by Japanese troops in 1937 that came to be known as "The Rape of Nanking," referring to the name by which the city was then known in the West.Historians generally agree the Japanese army slaughtered at least 150,000 civilians and raped tens of thousands of women. China says that as many as 300,000 people were killed.Memorials to the killings are scattered throughout the city. Stone tablets mark the site of a mass grave near the Yangtze. An execution ground is marked by a wall inscribed with the words "Never Forget." The main memorial -- itself built on the site of a mass grave -- is visited by tens of thousands of schoolchildren each year.Its gory photographs, Japanese army bayonets and exhumed bones are displayed for maximum emotional impact, with captions telling visitors to be outraged and to hold Japan to account.Such reminders go hand in hand with a sense among Chinese, shared by South Koreans and among some other Asians, that Japan has never shown sufficient remorse for its past and could again become an aggressor. Visits by Japanese politicians to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the spirits of war dead and some convicted war criminals, strengthen those fears.

in the picture: December 1937: Japanese recruits at bayonet drill use Chinese prisoners as targets, after the capture of Nanjing during the Sino-Japanese conflict.source: CNN website